Suggested Introductory Reading List

MA in Modern Literature
Department of English and Related Literature
The following list was compiled informally by asking faculty who teach on the MA to
name one or two theoretical texts that they think would be useful for postgraduate
students of modern literature and culture to have read. It is only a suggested reading list
and is not meant as an exhaustive or systematic bibliography for the study of modernism
and modernity. Rather, these are works that faculty have drawn on in their own work, or
which are otherwise significant to their research and teaching. This reading should
complement reading we assume students are already pursuing in the canons of literature
of the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
H. Porter Abbott, The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative (Cambridge UP, 2002)
Chris Baldick, The Modern Movement (Oxford UP, 2004)
Roland Barthes, Mythologies (Annette Lavers, trans.; Vintage, 1993 and various editions)
Charles Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life (various editions)
Walter Benjamin, Illuminations (Hannah Arendt, ed.; Harry Zohn, trans.; Schocken, 1969
and various editions)
Homi Bhabha, ed., Nation and Narration (Routledge, 1990)
Ernst Bloch, et al., Aesthetics and Politics. afterword by Fredric Jameson; Ronald Taylor,
translation editor. (Verso, 1980)
John Cook, ed., Poetry in Theory: An Anthology 1900-2000 (Blackwell, 2004).
Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot (Harvard UP, 1992)
Judith Butler, Gender Trouble (Routledge, 1990)
T.J. Clark, The Painting of Modern Life (Thames and Hudson, 1985)
Gerald Graff, ed., Limited Inc (Northwestern University Press, 1988)
Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory (Blackwell, 1996, 2nd Ed.)
Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume I (Robert Hurley, trans.; Penguin, 1984
and various editions)
Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (Constance Farrington, trans; Penguin, 2001 and
various editions)
Sigmund Freud, The Uncanny (Penguin, 2003 and various editions)
_____ . Beyond the Pleasure Principle (Penguin, 2003 and various editions)
Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Methuen,
1981)
Siegfried Kracauer, The Mass Ornament (Harvard UP, 1995)
Sally Ledger and Roger Luckhurst, eds, The Fin de Siecle: A Reader in Cultural History c.
1880-1900 (Oxford UP, 2000)
Martin McQuillan, ed., The Narrative Reader (Routledge, 2000)
Lynne Pearce, The Rhetorics of Feminism: Readings in Contemporary Cultural Theory and the
Popular Press (Routledge, 2003)
Ezra Pound, `A Retrospect' in Literary Essays of Ezra Pound (T.S. Eliot, ed.)
David Ian Rabey, English Drama Since 1940 (Longman, 2003)
Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (Vintage, 1994)
Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson eds., Women, Autobiography, Theory: A Reader (University
of Wisconsin Press, 1998)
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, The Spivak Reader: Selected Works of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak .
Donna Landry and Gerald Maclean, eds. (New York: Routledge 1995)